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Date of Birth : Feb 19th 1954
John Travolta was a huge star in the late 1970s, thanks to the success of TV's Welcome Back, Kotter and the movies Carrie (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). His career since has been a marvel of highs and lows: Moment By Moment (1978) was a legendary bomb, but Urban Cowboy (1980) was a pop culture trend-setter; he bombed again in Blow Out (1981) and Perfect (1983), yet he was in the financially successful comedy series Look Who's Talking (1989-93); he was hailed for a "comeback" and received an Oscar for his role in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994, co-starring Uma Thurman), but the critics famously held their noses for Battlefield Earth (2000). In spite of the lows, he is one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood and keeps making movies. He starred in Swordfish (2001, with Halle Berry and Hugh Jackman), Basic (2003, with Pulp Fiction co-star Samuel L. Jackson) and Be Cool (2005's sequel to Get Shorty, co-starring Vince Vaughn), and in 2007 he had a memorable role as a Baltimore housewife in the musical film Hairspray (also starring Christopher Walken).
Travolta married the actress Kelly Preston in 1991. They had two children: Jett (b. 1992) and Ella Bleu (b. 2000). Jett Travolta died on 2 January 2009 after having a seizure during a family vacation in the Bahamas… John Travolta, like fellow superstar Tom Cruise, is a Scientologist… He has a pilot's license and owns several aircraft.


text: Battalion: Nemesis (No Ratings Yet)Loading... Strategy frivweb 21 Aug , 2018 0 PLAY NOW! GAME INFO Battalion: Nemesis Battalion: Nemesis puts you in command of the Rapid Attack and Response unit commanded by Sergeant Tucker. Face off against the insidious Mullen in an epic 10 level campaign!nThere are a total of 16 levels to be played, where you can master the rules of tactical turn-based strategy combat.nSaving Information:nYour inter-level mission progress will be saved when you finish a level. If you beat a level, you should not need to beat it again. Choosing "Save and Quit" from the options menu in the middle of the mission will create a restore point. If you click on "Resume Save Point" on the title screen, the game will be restored to that save point. If you play a game on a different level or map, your resume point will be lost.n Mouse issues orders. Click an open tile in range to move there, or click an enemy unit in range to move next to it and attack. Arrow keys scroll and control key selects next available unit.n

subset: commoncrawl


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Pioneros - Argentinian Polo Belt 156 Green/Pale Blue/Navy with Cream Stripe
Complete the look with a stylish green, pale blue and navy polo belt from Pioneros, very much on trend this year, these embroidered belts will co-ordinate and enhance an outfit.
Expertly hand-stitched in Buenos Aires, from durable thread onto the finest bridle leather. Pioneros has developed the traditional pampa cross, favoured by Argentinian polo players, into their own unique designs and colours and the belts are finished with a brass-style buckle. Designed to be worn by both Men and Ladies and shown here in a striking yet easy to wear green, pale blue and navy colourway with a cream dividing stripe.
The measurements of our polo belts are taken from the tip of the buckle, around to the middle hole.
Pioneros Polo Belt - 156


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ESA PR 66-2002 Europe opens a window onto a violent Universe
17 October 2002
The European Space Agency has today launched a new observatory set to revolutionise the branch of astrophysics that seeks to unravel the secrets of the highest-energy - and therefore the most violent - phenomena in the Universe. This comes 20 years after the end of ESA's COS-B mission, which produced a complete map of the sky in the high-energy gamma-ray waveband.In the framework of ESA's cooperation with Russia, a Russian Proton launcher was chosen to place the Integral (INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) observatory in orbit. The launcher lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan today at 10:41 local time (06:41 CEST). After re-ignition of its upper stage, it placed Integral in its 72-hour elliptical orbit, ranging from only 10000 km up to 153000 km from the Earth, i.e. nearly half the distance to the Moon. Controlled by ESAs ESOC mission operations centre in Darmstadt in Germany, the satellite will now undergo a two-months test period intended first to verify that the instruments onboard are working correctly and then that the data they collect is of good quality.
Integral was developed by Italy's Alenia Spazio supported by over 30 firms in Europe. The satellite (mass 4 000 kg, height 5 metres) has two main instruments: the SPI spectrometer and IBIS imager
Developed by a Franco-German-led team, the spectrometer will conduct a spectral analysis of isolated sources and of regions of gamma-ray activity with unprecedented energy resolution (40 times better than previous satellites), using germanium detectors cooled to 85 K. Since mirrors and lenses are of no use in detecting gamma rays, the SPI uses the 'coded-mask imaging' technique to form its images from very faint radiation. These images are then decoded by computer.
The imager, designed by an Italian-led team, is the perfect partner for SPI. It has a weaker energy resolution, but an angular resolution 12 times sharper thanks to a coded mask optimised for the purpose and two new-generation detector layers.
To supplement the observations by SPI and IBIS, Integral also carries a Danish X-ray imager (JEM-X), with twin detectors each fitted with coded masks, and a Spanish CCD imager (OMC) operating in the visible spectrum waveband.
By combining the data collected by these four instruments, it will be possible, for the first time, to make simultaneous observations of high-energy phenomena at seven orders of magnitude, from visible light to gamma rays. All the raw data collected by Integral will be sent directly to the ground via the ESA station at Redu in Belgium, or the station operated by NASA another partner in the programme at Goldstone in the USA. The raw data will be centralised at ESOC in order to be processed and redistributed to the scientific community via the Integral Scientific Data Centre (ISDC) at Versoix in Switzerland.
Operating in an orbit that enables it to spend most of its time outside the Van Allen radiation belts, which can hamper observation of cosmic gamma rays, Integral will primarily study the densest sky objects, such as neutron stars and black holes, which are all sources of very high energy radiation. While IBIS will supply very detailed images of these sources, SPI will conduct the first in-depth analysis of this gamma radiation. Integrals observations should enable astrophysicists to confirm the presence of giant black holes at the centre of galaxies, starting with the Milky Way.
Other areas of interest for the European gamma-ray observatory will include events of rare violence such as nova and supernova explosions. These will be explored with precision thanks to the gamma radiation given off by the radioactive isotopes emitted. Integral will also be a unique means for observing gamma bursts, these still largely unexplained explosions at the outer reaches of the Universe, which for the first time can be studied in parallel along a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Integral is the second medium-size mission carried out under the Horizon 2000 programme, following the Huygens probe, whose destination is Saturn and its moon Titan; the third will be the Planck observatory, which will study the background noise of the Universe, as from 2007. The Integral mission should last at least two years.
For further information, please contact:
ESA Media Relations Service
Tel: +33 (0)1 53 69 7155
Fax: +33 (0)1 53 69 7690


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James Stirling
Quick Info
Garden (near Stirling), Scotland
Edinburgh, Scotland
James Stirling's father was Archibald Stirling and his mother, Archibald Stirling's second wife, was Anna Hamilton. James was their third son and he was born on the family estate at Garden, about 20 km west of the Scottish town of Stirling. The family were strong supporters of the Jacobite cause and this was to have a significant influence on James Stirling's life.The Jacobite cause was that of the Stuart king, James II (of Britain -- James VII of Scotland: Jacobus in Latin), exiled after the Revolution of 1688, and his descendants. Scotland was united to England and Wales in 1707. The Stuarts were Scottish but Roman Catholics and therefore they had only limited support. They did, however, offer an alternative to the British crown with an exiled court in France which had strong support from many such as the Stirling family. When James Stirling was about 17 his father was arrested, imprisoned and accused of high treason because of his Jacobite sympathies. However he was acquitted of the charges.
Nothing is known of Stirling's childhood or indeed about his undergraduate years in Scotland. The first definite information that we know is that he travelled to Oxford in the autumn of 1710 in order to matriculate there. Indeed Stirling matriculated at Balliol College Oxford on 18 January 1711 as a Snell Exhibitioner.
The terms of the Snell Exhibitions is described in [3]:-
The Snell Exhibitions to Balliol College were established by the will of an Ayrshire man John Snell (1629?-1679). They were originally intended for Scottish students within Scotland who had not graduated and who would subsequently return to Scotland as priests of the Church of England. Nominations were to be made by the College of Glasgow, one of the requirements of candidates being that they should have spent at least one year at Glasgow.Based on this, together with information from Ramsay (see [4]) who knew Stirling in later life and wrote that he was:-
bred at the University of Glasgowit is usual to state that indeed Stirling studied at the University of Glasgow (as is done in [1]). However this is not absolutely certain. We know that Ramsay is not always completely reliable. Stirling's name does not appear in the list of students matriculating at Glasgow (not all student's names occur so this is not very significant). Tweddle [3] notes that a student with the name 'James Stirling' matriculated at the University of Edinburgh on 24 March 1710, did not graduate, and has a signature which is similar to that of the mathematician. Another fact, which is not insignificant, is that Stirling's father was a graduate of Edinburgh. It would be nice to solve this and many other puzzles associated with Stirling's life but they may always remain as puzzles.
Stirling was awarded a second scholarship in October 1711, namely the Bishop Warner Exhibition. He should have sworn an oath when matriculating but his Jacobite sympathies would not let him do this and he was excused. Queen Anne died in August 1714 and the German, George I, acceded to the British throne. In 1715 there was the first Jacobite Rebellion, which melted away after the drawn Battle of Sheriffmuir on 13 November 1715. However the concession of allowing Stirling not to swear the oath was withdrawn. He lost his scholarships when he continued to refuse to take the oath. Then he was accused of corresponding with Jacobites who had been involved in planning the rebellion. Life must have been difficult for him at this time and he even appeared at the assizes charged with 'cursing King George' but he was acquitted.
Certainly Stirling could now not graduate from Oxford but he remained there for some time. In the minutes of a meeting of the Royal Society of London on 4 April 1717, when Brook Taylor lectured on extracting roots of equations and on logarithms, it is recorded:-
Mr Stirling of Balliol College Oxford had leave to be present.In 1717 Stirling published his first work Lineae Tertii Ordinis Neutonianae Ⓣ which extends Newton's theory of plane curves of degree 3, adding four new types of curves to the 72 given by Newton. The work was published in Oxford and Newton himself received a copy of the work which is dedicated to the Venetian ambassador Nicholas Tron.
Lineae Tertii Ordinis Neutonianae contains other results that Stirling had obtained. There are results on the curve of quickest descent, results on the catenary (in particular relating this problems to that of placing spheres in an arch), and results on orthogonal trajectories. The problem of orthogonal trajectories had been raised by Leibniz and many mathematicians worked on the problem in addition to Stirling, including Johann Bernoulli, Nicolaus(I) Bernoulli, Nicolaus(II) Bernoulli, and Leonard Euler. It is known that Stirling solved the problem early in the year 1716.
In 1717 Stirling went to Venice. The Venetian ambassador Tron left London to return to Venice in June 1717 and it is almost certain that Stirling travelled with him. Stirling seems to have been promised a chair of mathematics in Venice but, for some reason that is not known, the appointment fell through. What Stirling did in Venice is also not known but he certainly continued his mathematical research.
Stirling certainly was in Venice in 1719 since he submitted a paper Methodus differentialis Newtoniana illustrata Ⓣ to the Royal Society of London from Venice at that time. The paper was received by the Royal Society and reported to their meeting on 18 June 1719.
Nicolaus(I) Bernoulli occupied the chair at the University of Padua from 1716 until 1722. Stirling must have met Nicolaus(I) Bernoulli and got to know him quite well since, in 1719, he wrote to Newton, again from Venice, offering to act as a go-between. In 1721 Stirling was in Padua and we know that he attended the University of Padua at that time.
In 1722 Stirling returned to Glasgow, perhaps around the time that his friend Nicolaus(I) Bernoulli left Padua. There is a story told by Tweedie in [5] that Stirling learned the secrets of the glass industry while in Italy and had to flee for fear of his life since the glass-makers may have tried to assassinate him to prevent their secrets becoming known. It is not clear what he did between that time and late 1724 but it is clear that, at least from 1722, he had the intention of becoming a teacher in London.
In August 1722 Maclaurin visited Newton in London and Newton showed him a letter from Stirling in which Stirling wrote that he intended to set himself up as a mathematics teacher in London. Certainly Stirling was friendly with Newton and the letter was almost certainly asking for Newton's help in this venture, help which Newton was giving in telling Maclaurin of Stirling's plans.
In late 1724 Stirling travelled to London where he was to remain for 10 years. These were ten years in which Stirling was very active mathematically, corresponding with many mathematicians and enjoying his friendship with Newton. Newton proposed Stirling for a fellowship of the Royal Society of London and, on 3 November 1726, Stirling was elected.
Stirling achieved his aim of becoming a teacher in London when he was appointed to William Watt's Academy in Little Tower Street, Covent Garden, London which was [1]:-
... one of the most successful schools in London; and, although he had to borrow money to pay for the mathematical instruments he needed.The school's prospectus of 1727 lists a course on mechanical and experimental philosophy given by Stirling and others. The syllabus included mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, and astronomy.
While in London, Stirling published his most important work Methodus Differentialis Ⓣ in 1730. This book is a treatise on infinite series, summation, interpolation and quadrature. The asymptotic formula for now known as Stirling's formula for which Stirling is best known, appears as Example 2 to Proposition 28 of the Methodus Differentialis Ⓣ. See THIS LINK.
One of the main aims of the book was to consider methods of speeding up the convergence of series. Stirling notes in the Preface that Newton had considered this problem. As an example of the problem he is trying to solve Stirling gives the example of the series which had been studied by Brouncker in his work on the area under a hyperbola. Stirling writes, in Methodus Differentialis Ⓣ, that:-
...if anyone would find an accurate value of this series to nine places ... they would require one thousand million of terms; and this series converges much swifter than many others...Many examples of his methods are given, including Leibniz's problem of
and he also gives a theorem to treat convergence of an infinite product. Included in this work on accelerating convergence is a discussion of De Moivre's methods.
We mentioned above that he studied interpolation in the Methodus Differentialis Ⓣ. For example he defined the series with . He then considered , between the terms and . In today's notation this would be and Stirling here is studying the Gamma function. He calculated to ten decimal places. In fact
The book contains other results on the Gamma function and the Hypergeometric function.
De Moivre published Miscellanea Analytica Ⓣ in 1730. Stirling wrote to De Moivre pointing out some errors that he had made in a table of logarithms of factorials in the book and also telling De Moivre about Example 2 to Proposition 28 of Methodus Differentialis Ⓣ. De Moivre was able to extend his earlier results using Stirling's ideas and published a Supplement to Miscellanea Analytica a few months later. Clearly Stirling and De Moivre regularly corresponded around this time for in September 1730 Stirling relates the episode and new results of De Moivre in a letter to Gabriel Cramer.
There is another area of Stirling's work that we shall examine, namely his work on gravitation and the figure of the Earth. However, before doing so we will look at a correspondence that Stirling had with Euler since this relates to the work we have just discussed on series. Euler wrote to Stirling on 8 June 1736 from St Petersburg. We quote from his letter where he gives his opinion on Stirling's work (see [7] or [3]):-
... the more I have learned from your excellent articles, which I have seen here and there in your Transactions, concerning the nature of series, a study in which I have indeed expended much effort, the more I have wished to become acquainted with you in order that I could receive more from you yourself and also submit my own deliberations to your judgement. But before I wrote to you, I searched all over with great eagerness for your excellent book on the method of differences, a review of which I had seen a short time before in the Acta Lipsiensis, until I achieved my desire. Now that I have read through it diligently, I am truly astonished at the great abundance of excellent methods contained in such a small volume, by means of which you show how to sum slowly converging series with ease and how to interpolate progressions which are very difficult to deal with. But especially pleasing to me was proposition XIV of part 1 in which you give a method by which series, whose law of progression is not even established, may be summed with great ease using only the relation of the last terms, certainly this method extends very widely and is of the greatest use. In fact the proof of this proposition, which you seem to have deliberately withheld, caused me enormous difficulty, until at last I succeeded with very great pleasure in deriving it from the preceding results, which is the reason why I have not yet been able to examine in detail all the subsequent propositionsIn 1735 Stirling returned to Scotland where he was appointed manager of the 'Scotch mining company, Leadhills' in Lanarkshire at a salary of £120 per year. This was a job that Stirling did very well, he [8]:-
... proved extremely successful as a practical administrator, the condition of the mining company improving vastly owing to his method of employing labour to work the mines.However the work was very demanding. It was two years before he got round to replying to Euler's letter from which we quoted above. In the reply, dated 16 April 1738, and written from Edinburgh he explains why he has not replied sooner (see [7] or [3]):-
During these last two years I have been involved in a great many business matters which have required me to go frequently to Scotland, and then return to London. And it was on account of these affairs that first of all your letter came late into my hands and then that, even to this very day, there is scarcely time available for reading through your letter with the attention which it deserves. For after deliberations have been interrupted, not to say neglected, for a long time, patience is required before the mind can be brought to think about the same things once again.In the same letter Stirling offered to put Euler's name forward for election to the Royal Society of London. He did not do that, however, probably again through pressure of work with the mining company and it was not until 1746 that he was proposed by several mathematicians not including Stirling.
It appears that Stirling never replied to this second letter from Euler. He wrote to Maclaurin on 26 October 1738 saying that Euler's second letter was:-
... full of many ingenious things, but it is long and I am not quite master of all the particulars.In 1745 Stirling published a paper on the ventilation of mine shafts. He certainly did not give up mathematics when he took up the post in the mining company, and in [3] there is a discussion of unpublished mathematical work in notebooks of Stirling that were probably written between 1730 and 1745.
The year 1745 was the date of the most major of the Jacobite rebellions and Maclaurin played an active role in the defence of Edinburgh against the Jacobites. Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, entered Edinburgh with an army of 2,400 men on 17 September 1745. In 1746 Maclaurin died, partly as a consequence of the battles of the previous year, and Stirling was considered for his chair at Edinburgh. However Stirling's strong support for the Jacobite cause meant that such an appointment was impossible, especially in the year after the rebellion.
Stirling was elected to membership of the Royal Academy of Berlin in 1746. In 1753 he resigned from the Royal Society as he was in debt to the Society and could no longer afford the annual subscriptions. It cost him £20 to resign.
One non-mathematical contribution by Stirling is described in [8] (see also [5]):-
... he surveyed the Clyde with a view to rendering it navigable by a series of locks, thus taking the first step towards making Glasgow the commercial capital of Scotland. The citizens were not ungrateful, and in 1752 presented him with a silver tea-kettle 'for his service, pains, and trouble'.Finally we must discuss Stirling's second major mathematical contribution, namely his work on the figure of the Earth. On 6 December 1733 Stirling read a paper to the Royal Society entitled Twelve propositions concerning the figure of the Earth. The minutes of the Society state:-
Mr Stirling was ordered thanks, and was desired to communicate his Propositions.Indeed Stirling did submit an extended version of his results which appeared as Of the figure of the Earth, and the variation of gravity on the surface in 1735. In [1] the paper is described:-
In it he stated, without proof, that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, supporting Newton against the rival Cassinian view.Certainly Stirling was considered the leading British expert on the subject for the next few years by all including Maclaurin and Simpson who went on to make major contributions themselves. As Stirling's unpublished manuscripts show [3], he did go much further than the 1735 paper but probably the pressure of work at the mining company gave him too little time to polish the work. He explains in a letter to Maclaurin, dated 26 October 1738, why he has not published despite pressure to do so:-
I got a letter this last summer from Mr Machin wholly relating to the figure of the Earth and the new mensuration, he seems to think this a proper time for me to publish my proposition on that subject when everybody is making a noise about it; but I choose rather to stay till the French arrive from the south, which I hear will be very soon. And hitherto I have not been able to reconcile the measurements made in the north to the theory....In fact the French expedition to Ecuador, referred to by Stirling as 'the south', left in 1735 but did not return until 1744.
References (show)
- P J Wallis, Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990). See THIS LINK.
- Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Stirling
- I Tweddle, James Stirling: this about series and such things (Edinburgh, 1988).
- J Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1888).
- C Tweedie, James Stirling : a Sketch of his Life and Works along with his Scientific Correspondence (Oxford, 1922).
- W B Hendry, James Stirling 'The Venetian', Scotland's Magazine (Oct, 1965), 33-35.
- T A Krasotkina, The correspondence of L Euler and J Stirling (Russian), Istor.-Mat. Issled. 10 (1957), 117-158.
- James Stirling, Dictionary of National Biography LIV (London, 1898), 379-380. See THIS LINK.
- I Tweedle, James Stirling's early work on acceleration of convergence, Archive for History of Exact Science 45 (1992), 105-125.
Additional Resources (show)
Other pages about James Stirling:
Other websites about James Stirling:
Honours (show)
Honours awarded to James Stirling
Cross-references (show)
- Student Projects: Indian Mathematics - Redressing the balance: Chapter 11
- Other: 18th January
- Other: 3rd November
- Other: 6th December
- Other: Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (H)
- Other: Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (M)
- Other: Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (S)
- Other: Earliest Uses of Symbols for Constants
- Other: London Miscellaneous
- Other: London individuals S-Z
- Other: Oxford Institutions and Colleges
- Other: Oxford individuals
Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update Sept1998
Last Update Sept1998


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A lot of what I've been working on the past two years has been built on the assumption that the model that social networks use today will fundamentally change. Social networks have largely been built on the premise of being walled gardens in such a way that users can't communicate or share content or friends across networks; put simply this is what keeps a Facebook user from being able to send a message to a MySpace user. This is the same model that destroyed AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy's ISP businesses when normal people chose the Internet itself versus their thoughtfully curated walled gardens.
Over the past year we've seen an uptick in the infrastructure, development tools and projects designed to build the social web (n.b. I define the social web as something that is inherently decentralized, just like the web itself). On top of that, MySpace has gone from being off of most developer's radars to the most open social network in existence. With MySpace I'm able to use my account to sign into other sites via OpenID, share my activity using Activity Streams, build applications using OpenSocial, interact with their APIs using OAuth and access APIs that not only allow the creation of new content within MySpace's garden but also extract data from it.
While Facebook has made significant contributions to open source projects, ranging from some of their own to memcached, they've largely been absent from much of this progress around building the social web (remember, I define it as being inherently decentralized). Instead, like Microsoft they have willfully ignored many industry efforts in favor of their own proprietary development platforms. To their credit, they've been one of the most innovative social networks over the past two years, pushing the boundaries of what's been thought of as possible with features like social tagging in photos, Newsfeed, Platform, Beacon, integrated chat and Connect.
Two weeks ago this changed. Facebook joined the board of the OpenID Foundation, released two-way APIs around status, notes, pictures and videos, hosted a user experience summit focused on OpenID and released a blog commenting widget powered by Connect. Since then they've also talked about how they wish to support the Activity Streams project and have reiterated their commitment to the sort openness that we've been promoting as key pieces of the social web.
I know what you're thinking: "talk is cheap." True, Digg said they'd support OpenID three years ago and we've seen…or wait, no we haven't! I wish I had something concrete to point at to show that my next argument isn't crazy, but I don't. All that I can point to is the change I'm seeing when interacting with Facebook and their interactions with developers this year compared to the past.
My prediction is that by the end of the year Facebook will become the most open social network on the social web. I believe that not only have they now found business value in doing so, but also truly believe that the next phase of their mission, "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" requires that they do so. This means that anyone building a business based on the notion that Facebook will remain a walled garden and won't adapt – as was true with traditional media when blogging came about – will have their world turned upside down this year.
Disagree if you like, but my second argument is that if Facebook does not seriously embrace these ideas this year that their current position of dominance will be usurped. I'm not saying that Facebook will go away, that all of my friends will leave, that it will become irrelevant or that tens of thousands of developers will move on overnight. This year, there is an amazing opportunity to find and define a proper balance between traditional walled-garden social networks and completely decentralized efforts like the DiSo Project.


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Kanetsune Knives
Kanetsune Knives Located in Seki City, the City of Blades in the 800-year-old blade capital of the Orient, Kanetsune knives are great imported. "Seki-den" is the secret method of Japanese sword-making that has been passed down to our present age from 800 years ago. Mr. Kanetsune Seki, one of the finest master craftsmen in Japan, preserves the ancient traditions with these Kanetsune Knives. All items listed were made in Japan.


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Each year, state law requires the Orange County Board of Commissioners to adopt a balanced, annual budget by June 30. The process begins in the spring, when each county department submits to the county manager a budget request for the next fiscal year. The county manager, in consultation with budget and finance staff, reviews the departmental proposals and compiles an overall county budget that is submitted to the Board of Commissioners in early May. The BOCC holds a series of public hearings and budget work sessions to review each proposal and the projected revenues to determine the final county budget.
Most of a county's budget pays for services that are mandated by either the state or federal governments. Below is a list of services that counties must provide for residents as mandated by the state:
Orange County also provides many non-mandated services, such as Parks and Recreation, the Public Library, Solid Waste Management, Public Transportation, Economic Development, etc. The county is not required to offer these kinds of services, but opts to do so to improve the quality of life for the county.
Public Education is a priority for the Orange County Board of Commissioners. The board has a funding target that 48.1 percent of general fund revenues be dedicated to education.The FY19-20 adopted budget exceeds that target at 49.4% of revenues.
North Carolina's school finance system was created more than eighty years ago. The state is responsible for instructional expenses (including personnel) while county governments pay for capital expenses (buildings and maintenance).
In recent years, state funding for public education has been reduced. According to Public Schools First NC, state government per-pupil spending went from $8,867 per student in 2007-08 ($10,483 in today's dollars) to $9,528 in 2017-18. Adjusted for today's dollars, that is a decline of $955 per student.
As a result, Orange County's contribution to public schools current expense needs has increased. The 2019-20 budget includes an increase of $187.25 per student. These supplemental funds pay for additional personnel such as teacher's assistants, salary supplements for teachers and school administrators to help the schools attract and retain experienced and qualified teachers, and other needs requested by the schools.
The Public School Forum of North Carolina compiles county expenditure data each year. In 2016-17, the last available year, Orange County ranked No. 1 in the state for local per pupil spending.
Orange County provides supplemental funding to our public school systems to make up for shortfalls in state funding. These supplemental funds pay for additional personnel, salary supplements for teachers and school administrators to help the schools attract and retain experienced and qualified teachers, and other needs requested by the schools.
However, final decisions on how these funds are used by the school systems rest with each Board of Education. The Board of County Commissioners does not dictate how these local funds are prioritized and spent. The county receives funding requests from each school system, reviews those requests and then decides on an amount to provide to the systems. The county does not go through the school's requested budgets and decide which items they will fund. Each Board of Education prioritizes how they will spend the funds from the county.
Orange County raised property taxes only once in the nine years prior to FY 2018-19 (see chart below). The small tax increase (1.27 cents) in FY 2018-19 and the increase in the 2019-20 budget (1.75 cents) are largely related to the bond issues that were approved by voters in November 2016 ($120 million for public schools and $5 million for affordable housing). As more of these funds are released, the county incurs debt service.
An * by a year denotes the county underwent a property revaluation.
The Board of Orange County Commissioners (BOCC) have received several communications asking how the quarter-cent property tax increase dedicated to Climate Change Mitigation will be allocated. The BOCC directed the County Manager as part of their approval process to develop options and a process through which funds will be authorized.
The County Manager has directed staff to develop options over the summer for the Board's review in September. Those options will address the focus of spending, the incorporation of social justice and racial equity goals, the role of various advisory committees, as well as the BOCC's own approval framework.
The adopted county budget funds many programs to combat poverty in our county, through our Aging, Child Support, Social Services, Housing and Community Development, Partnership to End Homelessness, Criminal Justice Resource, Public Transportation, Human Rights and Relations, and Health Departments as well as nearly $1.5 million in funding to outside agencies, many of whom address poverty.
This year's budget includes a new Restoration Legal Counsel position that will expand and enhance the efforts already underway by the District Attorney and judicial stakeholders to assist eligible individuals that have driver's license suspensions based on an inability to pay traffic court debt. In addition, this attorney position will provide legal assistance for residents eligible to seek relief under North Carolina's expanding expunction statutes. The revocation of driving privileges and a criminal charge, even one that has been dismissed, create significant barriers to employment, education, housing, health care and family stability.
In the 2018-19 fiscal year, the commissioners appropriated $100,000 to create a new local voucher program for affordable housing. The program will be continued in the 2019-20 budget.
The Board of County Commissioners have the statutory responsibility to adopt a balanced budget prior to June 30 of each year. The Local Government Budget and Fiscal Control Act (N.C. General Statutes, Chapter 159, Article 3) governs the budgeting process for counties and cities. The board adopts the budget by setting revenues and expenditures. The county fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30.
Orange County is continually looking for projects that will bring better jobs to the county as well as increase the commercial property tax base. In recent years, the county has landed investments like the Morinaga plant in Mebane and the Wegmans Market coming to Chapel Hill in 2020. These projects will increase the commercial property tax base and, in the case of Wegmans, will bring in more local sales tax revenues.
Unfortunately, it would take dozens of similar projects to increase the commercial property tax base enough to realize an overall reduction in the property tax rate. The county and towns' commitment to preserving the rural nature of the county through the Rural Buffer and other programs limits how much commercial development can be brought into Orange County.
Orange County welcomes public input into the county budget. Each year the Board of Commissioners hold public hearings to receive feedback from interested parties. For the FY2020 budget process, public hearings will be held May 14 at the Whitted Building in Hillsborough and May 16 at Southern Human Services in Chapel Hill. Residents and taxpayers are given an opportunity to speak about the budget (up to three minutes per person). Each hearing begins at 7 p.m.
In addition, residents and taxpayers may communicate directly with the Board of Commissioners via email or attend any regularly scheduled BOCC meeting and sign-up to speak during the public comment portion (three minute limit also applies). Below is the schedule of work sessions and regular meetings for the FY2020 budget adoption.


text: The scheduling of PRI course locations is primarily based upon request. While 2021 dates are limited, we are looking ahead to 2022 and welcome the opportunity to collaborate! If you would like to host a PRI course in your city, please submit the form below and we will contact you with more details.


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For your child getting good grades in their GCSE examinations is instrumental in gaining that place in college, and being able to enrol on the courses they have chosen.
As they prepare and revise, for their English Literature GCSE, they may need some individual one to one tuition to help them feel completely confident. Our tutors are exceptional in their field, and enable students to bring together all the concepts, so they fully understand this subject.


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Perdana 3501 1971/1972
Serang 3502 1972/1973
Ganas 3503 1972/1973
Ganyang 3504 1972/1973
Ordered in 1970, the Perdana class is close to the norm in displacement and dimensions of standard La Combattante IID class FAC(M)s. The main difference is that the Perdana class comes with a modified weapons fit as compared to those generally found in the class. Built by Construction Mecaniques de Normandie (CMN) Cherbourg, the Perdana's are the first Royal Malaysian Navy vessels to be fitted with Exocet missiles for surface warfare. The vessel packs enough punch in her small size for warfare in the relatively shallower and confined waters of the territory where her manoeuvrability and speed is an advantage against larger vessels. This allows the vessels in times of war to operate more effectively in the area's combat operations despite her small size and comparative lack of sophistication although their ESM suite has been upgraded to Thales DR3000S. However, these FAC anti-ship platforms are not adequately defended against air and sub-surface threats and with a limited durability in open seas, makes them unsuitable for long-range patrolling and protecting of offshore installations in the South China Sea. Although not quite with sea denial capability, these FAC's still provide credible enforcement and offensive value to the navy as they can temporarily close off choke points until the more capable navy vessels arrive to take up the fight. Nonetheless recent photographs of the class seems to indicate that their missiles have been removed during operations and now operate as gun equipped crafts only.
Dimensions: 47m x 7m x 3.9m
Guns: 1 x 57mm/70 Bofors SAK Mk1, 1 x 40mm/70 Bofors, launchers for four 57mm chaff/flare illuminants on side mountings.(Range : Main 17 Km, Aux : 12Km/4Km)
Missile: 2x MM38 Exocet Single Box Launchers. (Range : 42 Km)
Electronics: Thomson CSF TH-D 1040 Triton, Decca 1226 radars, Pollux Fire control radar used with the Vega optical gun fire control system, Electronic Suite Machinery(ESM) RDL 2ABC with radar warning elements.
Propulsion: 4x MTU 870 Diesels giving 14000hp to four shafts
Speed: 36.5 knots range 3333 Km at 15 knots
Crew: 35
Handalan Class FAC-M
Perkasa 3512 1978/1979
Pendekar 3513 1978/1979
Gempita 3514 1978/1979
The Handalan class vessels or Spica-M FAC(M) are a heavier variant of the Swedish Spica II (Norrkoping) Class. They were built by Kalskrona Varvet and ordered by the Navy in 1976. The class replaced the Perkasa class FAC-T/M squadron with the names being transferred. Compared to the original Swedish vessel, these vessels come with new longer-range diesel engines and a different weapons fit consisting of four Exocet missiles and an additional Bofors 40mm gun. The bridge of the vessel is also brought further forward to accommodate the Exocet launchers and rear gun. The vessels are additionally equipped with a data-link communications system allowing exchange of data through computer with similarly equipped naval units and shore establishments. They also have elaborate countermeasures, weapon control system and tracking equipment. In addition, a new Thales DR3000S ESM suite has been installed. The vessels of the class are thus more well-armed, more capable and equipped with better radar than the larger sized Perdana class vessels. This makes the vessels in the Handalan squadron a force that cannot be taken lightly by the opposing navy as they are capable of bringing the offensive to the enemy during combat, even without support from the navy's larger units which is contrary to normal tactic of FAC naval doctrine.
Dimensions: 43.6m x 7.1m x 2.4m
Guns: 1 x 57mm/70 Bofors SAK Mk1, 1 x 40mm/70 Bofors, launchers for 57mm illuminants on side mountings. (Range : Main 17 Km, Aux : 12Km/4Km)
Missile: 2x MM38 twin launchers for four Exocet missiles.(Range 42 Km)
Electronics: Philips 9GR600, Decca 1226 radars, 9LV 212 radar used with 9LV 228 Mk2 fire control system, Optronic AA fire control system, ECM MEL Susie-1 with warning elements, Simrad SU sonar removed.
Propulsion: 3x MTU 16V 538 TB91 diesels delivering 10865hp to three shafts
Speed: 34.5knots, range 2977 Km at 14 knots
Crew: 40
Jerong Class FAC(G)
Todak 3506 1976
Paus 3507 1976
Yu 3508 1976
Baung 3509 1977
Pari 3510 1977
The Jerong class is a variant of Lurssen FPB/TNC-45 vessels that was completed to a less formidable FAC-(G ) configuration, with lighter arms and a less sophisticated electronics fit. They were ordered based on three rather than four shaft propulsion arrangement that is common to the class, therefore they were built to a reduced performance specification. Ordered in 1973, the vessels were licensed-built locally by Hong-Leong Lurssen Shipyards under a major technology transfer program. Unlike the missile-armed FAC squadrons of the navy, the Jerong class is equipped only with a main gun for closed-in combat and fire support. As such, they are capable as far as gunboats go for peacetime duties of patrolling the Exclusive Economic Zone, intercepting illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries and conducting anti-piracy operations. However, they are of limited use in a shooting war except for naval bombardment or possibly for guerrilla-type tactics of naval warfare, as hull space constraints do not allow the installation of a sophisticated sensor system and extended operations in open sea conditions. In such guerrilla action, these smaller combatants would still be able to trouble the larger intruders with a 'hit-and-run' strategy by packing a mean punch that belies their small size and lack of high-technology gadgetry. In the meantime, they are expected to assume a greater share of coastal patrol duties upon the final decommissioning of the navy's patrol craft squadrons.
Displacement: 210 tons standard, 244 tons full loadDimensions: 44.9m x 7m x 2.5m
Guns: 1 x 57mm/70 Bofors SAK Mk1, 1 x 40mm/70 Bofors, launchers for 57mm illuminants on side mountings.(Range : Main 17 Km, Aux : 12Km/4Km)
Electronics: Decca 1226, Kelvin-Hughes MS32 radars, Naja Optronic director used with WM28 fire control radar.
Propulsion: 3 x MTU 16V 538 TB90 diesels giving 9900hp to 3 shafts
Speed: 32 knots, range 2897 Km at 16 knots
Crew: 36
Tuah Class FFT
Hang Tuah F-76 1966/1977
Displacement: 2300 tons standard, 2520 tons full load
Dimensions: 103.5m x 12.2m x 4.8m
Guns: 1x 57mm/70 Bofors SAK Mk 1, 2x 40/70 mm Bofors. (Range : Main 17 Km, Aux : 12Km/4 Km)
ASW: 1 x Mk10 Limbo Mortar (3 tubes), (Range : 900 metres)
Electronics: Plessey AWS1, 978 Radars, Type 170B and Type 174 Sonars, Matra Defense Naja Optical Director
Propulsion: 2 x Stork Wartsila 12SW28 Diesels at 19856 hp, two shafts, controllable pitch propellers
Speed: 24 knots, range 7725 Km at 14 knots
Crew: 210
Aircraft: Platform aft.
Mahamiru Class MCMV
Mahamiru 11 1983/1985
Jerai 12 1983/1985
Ledang 13 1984/1985
Kinabalu 14 1984/1985
The Royal Malaysian Navy became the second Navy to purchase Lerici class Mine Counter Measure Vessel(MCMV) when on 20 February 1981 they awarded Intermarine Spa a contract for four MCMV'S, well before the completion of the first "Lerici" built for the Italian Navy. The hulls of the four ships are made of fibre glass reinforced plastics (GRP) that are able to avoid detection by the sensitive trigger equipment of modern mines. The first of this class was launched in April 1983 but they were only delivered by the end of 1985 because technical problems delayed their arrival. Due to the specific operational and technical requirements of the Royal Malaysian Navy, their configuration are completely different from the one selected by the Italian Navy, although the hull concept is the same. However, the propulsion system is based on a concept similar to that of the Italian Navy, being implemented by two separate propulsion systems. For transit and normal navigation the ship is propelled by two diesel engines driving two controllable pitch propellers, giving the ship a speed of more than 16 knots. For precise navigation over a minefield the ship is propelled by two Riva Calzoni auxiliary thrusters, each driven by an electro - hydraulic motor, and can achieve a speed of 6 knots. Three diesel generators, all of them located above the water line to minimise the magnetic signature and the underwater-irradiated noise, generate electric power. The 500-tonne vessels, each with a crew of between 48 and 65, was bought for about RM100 million each and such vessels come in handy during wartime to ensure the nation's ports and water lanes are free of mines and other submerged hazards. For defence, the vessels have a 40mm gun that serves as the main weapon. The vessels are also equipped with a Mines Disposal Vehicle (MDV) and new Olister unmanned mine countermeasure units has been purchased to replace the old units. Usually the crew would take about 20 minutes to destroy a mine after its detection. Although the vessels primary purpose is to identify and destroy mines, they are also used for offshore patrol since their size, range and weaponry is sufficient for such duties.
Displacement : 540 tons standard, 610 tons full load
Dimensions : 51m x 9.9 m x 2.85 m
Guns : 1x 40mm/70 Bofors (Range : Main 12Km/4Km)
Electronics : Thomson Command and Control system Combat system with Thomson TSM 2060, Decca 1226 and Trident for precise navigation, Thomson Sintra TSM 2022 hull mounted sonar for mines discovery and classification, 2 ECA PAP 104 Mine Disposal Vehicles
Propulsion : 2 x MTU 12V396 TC 82 diesels, 2605hp to 2 shafts, controllable pitch propellers normal, 2 Azimuthal Thrusters giving 119 hp for mine-hunting propulsion
Speed : 16 knots, range 4630 Km at 12 Knots
Crew : 45


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Sortie en cd et vinyl
Quasi - Sam Coomes, Janet Weiss and Joanna Bolme - have been rocking the sticky floored graffiti scrawled dimly lit trenches since 1993. What's been learned in these long years? Get off your ass, kick out the jams, lay it on the line, and communal mind meld is within reach. Do it for love and there is no reason for regrets.
Portland duo-turned-trio Quasi have now announced details of their forthcoming eighth album, American Gong. Mixed by Steve Fisk, Tucker Martine and Dave Fridmann, the follow-up to 2006's When the Going Gets Dark is set for release on 22nd February 2010 through Domino in the UK & Europe, and Kill Rock Stars in the US.
Quasi - whose members have stints in Sleater-Kinney, Heatmiser, and Stephen Malkmus' Jicks - will be performing at the Pavement curated ATP festival in Minehead ATP (14th – 16th May), and are soon to announce further UK and European dates for the Spring. Quasi will also be performing at Portland's Doug Fir Lounge on New Years Eve playing covers of the Who.
American Gong will be available on CD (WIGCD242), LP (WIGLP242) and via digital download (WIG242D). The tracklisting is as follows:
01 Repulsion
02 Little White Horse
03 Everything and Nothing at All
04 Bye Bye Blackbird
05 The Jig Is Up
06 Black Dogs and Bubbles
07 Death Is Not the End
08 Rockabilly Party
09 Now What
10 Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler
11 Howler


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Ohio Has Record Low Traffic Deaths In 2013
< < Back toOhio had a record low number of traffic deaths in 2013, according to preliminary data released Wednesday by the State Highway Patrol.
At least 923 people died on Ohio roads during the past year, and additional deaths are under review but have not been confirmed as traffic deaths, making the possible total 981, according to patrol figures. It would be the first time Ohio has had fewer than 1,000 traffic deaths since record-keeping began in 1936.
The previous low was 1,016 in 2011, according to the patrol's revised statistics. In 2012, Ohio had 1,122 deaths.
The patrol had strived to get the number of deaths below 1,000, said the patrol's superintendent, Col. Paul Pride. But reaching that benchmark is couched in the reality that so many lives still were lost, he said.
"That's all well and good, unless you're the family of one of those folks that perished on our roadways, and it's not so good of a year for you. And we recognize that," Pride said.
Starting in the late 1960s, Ohio logged at least 2,500 traffic deaths for five consecutive years, with a record high of more than 2,770 in 1969. Since then, many factors have contributed to decreasing that number and improving road safety, Pride said. Among them: better emergency medical care, improved engineering of vehicles and roads, and law enforcement and educational efforts by various agencies.
This year, the patrol partly credits an increased focus on high-traffic metropolitan areas that tend to have more crash deaths than others. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, had 18 fewer traffic fatalities in 2013 than the previous year, and the total for Franklin County, which includes Columbus, dropped by 11, according to preliminary counts earlier this week.
The patrol also points to seatbelt use and driver impairment as key factors affecting the number of deaths. The number of alcohol-related crash deaths decreased significantly in 2013, as did the number of people who died who were not wearing seatbelts, Pride said.
The vast majority of deadly crashes involve single fatalities. In a rare occurrence this year, Ohio had two crashes that each killed six people.
A March 10 crash in Warren, in northeast Ohio, killed the 19-year-old driver of a speeding SUV and five of the seven teenagers riding with her. In mid-October, a man, his wife and their four daughters died when a police cruiser responding to a robbery report struck their car at an intersection near Columbus.


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Mars Classroom ResourcesEarth/Mars Comparison Poster Front Earth/Mars Comparison Poster Back (contains classroom activities) Curiosity rover coloring sheet (PDF, 3.89 MB) Curriculum SupplementsRobotics activities are available. Download the activity summaries (PDF, 1.33 MB) or the full activity set (PDF, 1.08 MB). The Mars Curriculum Modules are designed to help bring the topic of Mars into your 4th through 12th grade classrooms.
NASA Resources and Educational Programs
Educational Sites Created by Mars Missions and InstrumentsWhat is Mars' weather today? How deep are Mars' valleys and how high are its mountains? What can we learn from Mars' magnetic field? What's Mars made of? More Resources |


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[in translation; continued from the previous post]
Southern Weekend: The Women's Traffic & Patrol Special Detachment that was set up under Wang Lijun, will it be disbanded?
Chongqing Police Official: The Women's Traffic & Patrol Special Service Detachment, the idea for the future is to maintain a normal institutional structure, there will be men and women, some women will be diverted to other departments. Let some women comrades join the Traffic & Patrol for nonviolent law enforcement, that's all right, but to set a special women's detachment, we do not quite agree. Especially, the design of a special uniform for them was a serious breach of regulation, something that had never happened in the history of China's public security. Since May 1st of this year, the Women's Traffic & Patrol Detachment has changed the uniform.
SW: Any results after you made the above adjustments?
Chongqing Police Official: Of course. The police platforms emptied manpower from the stations, and the basic work in public security was very weak, that was why the "3 • 19 gun-robbery" case was not solved for a long time. When solving the Zhou Kehua case, we did not make big noise. In less than four days Zhou Kehua was [found and] shot; police from stations played a direct role in this, and the masses provided important clues, which proves the importance of public security grass-roots work.
SW: After a series of twists and turns, has the operational capacity of the Chongqing Public Security declined?
Chongqing Police Official: Objectively speaking, in recent years the Chongqing police's operational capacity has declined somewhat, but it's hard to say how much. There are several reasons: First, the 2010 "institutional reform" made a mess for cadres. Institutional restructuring was originally required by the central government and the city, and the requirement was legitimate. However, Wang Lijun required all 308 division-level cadres and 2544 subdivision-level cadres be dismissed. All had to start over and try regain their positions through competition. Because he did not trust the local cadres, Wang Lijun also required 200 division-level cadres to be transferred in from outside, but we had only a total of over three hundred posts at that level. The complete overturn was to pave the way for outside cadres. At the time, the comrade who was heading the Political Department said that, according to regulations, administration personnel are appointed but not hired, thus they can't be simply dismissed from employment. Wang Lijun thought about it and said, "Then lets call it 'dismiss from tasks'.". That was how this new term was coined by Wang Lijun. In this way, all human resources were disrupted, a large number of highly skilled cadres effectively became rookies, and needed time to get familiar with their new jobs. Secondly, 11,800 new police were recruited and placed in their posts directly, which caused the poor quality of case-solving in recent years. Now we have decided to start career training for the new police.
SW: I heard that you recently restored posts for some police officials at division and subdivision levels who had failed to regain employment through competition. Does this mean you let some unqualified officials return to their posts?
Chongqing Police Official: According to the regulations, in institutional reform, the filling of posts should first consider existing qualified cadres, and then use any vacant posts for employment through competition. But he overturned everything.
When giving examinations, he made it clear one test that must be included was whether police had studied Bo Xilai's and his speeches. After some struggle, we managed to also include some professional questions. Overall, the quality of cadres who passed the exams was not too bad.
In the end, 159 division level and 968 subdivision level cadres were not used. Most of those were either not allowed to participate in the competition because Wang Lijun put trumped-up charges on them, or they passed the competition but Wang did not like them and did not want to use them. Recently, this group of cadres went through re-examination, and 76 division level cadres and 299 subdivision level cadres were reappointed. For those who have reached the retirement age, their treatment is retained but they no longer work on key posts. For the few with very low public acceptance and poor performance, we did not reappoint.
1123 police demanded vindication
SW: Recently, we keep hearing that the Chongqing police launched a large scale internal vindication. How many police have been vindicated?
Chongqing Police Official: In May, we set up a special review team headed by a Deputy Chief, to specifically accept and review complaints of police who had been punished. So far we received a total of 1123 police complaints. Because some of the cases involve multiple individuals, the number of police that require review is 2202. So far 1796 have been reviewed; 78% of the original decisions were overturned, 13% retained, and 9% modified. A number of departmental, division and subdivision police have resumed their duties and received retroactive wages. So far 133 resumed their leadership positions, including 48 at the division level, and 85 at the subdivision level. Among another 9 cadres at deputy departmental level who had been dismissed, 3 have resumed their positions, and another six are under review.
SW: Why have so many police officers been punished? In what situations have the original decisions been overturned, retained, or modified respectively? With so much revocation, it's tempting to think some problematic police are returning to their posts.
Chongqing Police
Official: Let me give you a few examples:
One, in 2010 a
middle school student drowned in Yongchuan
District. The district police investigated
and concluded it
was suicide. But
family refused to
accept the conclusion,
they posted on the internet and advertised
on the
streets offering a reward.
After Wang
Lijun learned about this, he
called the district
police chief and demanded
an immediate arrest of that family. The
district chief
did not make the arrest, instead he let the family and school
negotiate compensation. Later
the family
went to petition
Municipal Police Bureau. Wang Lijun
got very angry,
called the district chief to his municipal office, scolded
him, and
requested the family members of the deceased to be sent to labor
camp. The district
chief did not follow Wang's instructions. Soon
Lijun removed him from his position
and transferred him to the command
center to work as a common police for
nine months.
after the new municipal police chief arrived
this year, was he
able to resume his position. He now serves
as the director of
the police coordination department.
were indicted for little things. Once, Wang Lijun went to
Kaixian County
for an inspection, and the county police bureau's reception
for his visit did
not meet his high standard.
Wang was
very unhappy. After he returned, he immediately let his deputy
chief Tang
Jianhua form a work team to investigate the county police
bureau's leadership.
In the end, they listed more than 50 counts of crimes and
removed most of the
county police leaders and a large number of cadres. Another
time, Wang Lijun
passed by the Discipline Committee's office and saw the toilet
window's blinds
were broken, he dismissed the entire office. Anywhere he went,
even out of
Chongqing, he required his office staff to tell hotel staff
that, when pouring
wine for him, the wine must be substituted with water.
Sometimes the hotel
staff made a mistake and poured wine instead of water, Wang
would get mad and
punish a bunch of his office staff.
On the other hand, 13% of the police whose sanctions are maintained did have problems. For example, some police drove a police car to beat up civilians. The director of a police station didn't go to the [crime] site after receiving reports, instead he demanded the off-duty deputy director go; the delay caused the suspect to flee and run over a person. These people, under Wang Lijun or not, must be punished by law. In some cases of over-punishment, charges were reduced after our investigation.
On police vindication, the former secretary of the Politics and Law Committee, Liu Guanglei and the current secretary, Liu Pu, all gave specific instructions and guidance. They requested us to do a good job on ideological work. The Municipal Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Organizational Department, and the Politics and Law Committee all gave us a lot of support. Currently, Chongqing's police force has gradually stabilized.
SW: Recently, there has been news that the Chongqing police had often used torture to extract confessions, is it true?
Chongqing Police Official: Recently some people were talking about Tieshanping. (Editorial note: According to media reports, a militia training base located on top of Chongqing's Tieshanping Forest Park had been used as the "outsourced interrogation base" for the "smash black" campaign). Whether there existed torture is under investigation by the People's Procuratorate. I won't comment on specific cases, but let me make two statements: first, the police departments must serve their duties to fight against crime and protect the people, any cases violating the criminal law and endangering people's lives and property, the police must handle in accordance with law. Second, any cases handled by Chongqing police, no matter when, no matter what kind, as long as there is a complaint, we will strictly and carefully review according to law, fairly and justly deal according to law.
SW: I feel you now blame Wang Lijun for lots of the problems; Why didn't the Chongqing Police Bureau's Party Committee play its due role of supervision and discipline?
Chongqing Police Official: I'll give you a few more examples. Because a policeman from Wushan County petitioned, Wang Lijun punished the entire leadership of the county's police bureau. The news was spread on the internet, then a bunch of comrades in the Propaganda Division were punished. At a Party Committee meeting, a committee member suggested that "We shouldn't overthrow a large number [of cadres]." Wang pounded the table, "XXX, screw you! Shut up your stinky mouth!"
When Woman's Traffic & Patrol Police was established, the uniform they used was not the one regulated by the Ministry of Public Security, but was designed by the order of Wang Lijun. One of the Party Committee Members suggested that the Ministry of Public Security has clear regulation on uniforms, and this [design] resulted in a serious breach of the regulation. Wang Lijun was very angry: "XXX, do you mean only you understand the Ministry's regulations but not me? Only you follow the decision of the Ministry but not me?" The committee member had to say: "I didn't mean that, I was just doing my duty as a deputy." Wang Lijun said, "It's okay to make suggestions, but always think twice before you do."
Wang Lijun publicly claimed at a Party committee meeting: "Let me tell you, I can remove, even arrest, the entire leadership of the Party Committee within a day." At a police General Assembly, Wang Lijun also said publicly: "All of you (in the audience), including those leaders on the stage, I can get within a day." That sort of thing, first you are unable to change, second you'd do yourself in.
SW: We always say that the
current regulations are all very good,
then why did those things happen under such a good system?
Chongqing Police Official: This is for individual reasons. Under the same system, why do we perform well now?
SW: Aren't there things worthy of rethinking?
Chongqing Police Official: Power was not restrained, power was abused. The lack of monitoring is what led to some lawless things happening in the Chongqing Municipal Police Bureau.
SW: Did Wang Lijun have some good aspects?
Chongqing Police Official: Some things seem like his merits. For example, he requested that, if a police officer has a traffic accident, whether it's the police's responsibility or not, he must be detained. Of course some people supported this. Public support is of course a good thing, but sometimes the law was violated in order to win some people's support, which shouldn't be done. On the other hand, even though Wang Lijun punished a lot of people, sometimes he would use capable individuals who had offended him. #
(You can read the Chinese text here.)


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MEMPHIS — It's 1968. In Vietnam, the Tet offensive has begun. In Europe, a million students marching through the streets of Paris have brought France to the brink of revolution. Meanwhile, half a million Warsaw Pact troops, determined to snuff out the Prague Spring, have invaded Czechoslovakia.
In Memphis, at the Lorraine Motel, an assassin's bullet has ripped through the cheek of Martin Luther King Jr. And in New York, Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist with a chip on her shoulder, has fired three bullets at the Pop artist Andy Warhol.
The world's in turmoil. But Warhol's friend Maria Sol Escobar, known to everyone as Marisol, is meanwhile approaching a kind of Pop apotheosis.
For the best part of a dizzying decade, Marisol has been the talk of New York. When her breakthrough solo show opened at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1962, "word spread like wildfire," remembered gallery owner Eleanor Ward. The show was described by Irving Sandler in the New York Post as "one of the most remarkable shows to be seen this season," and by fellow critic Max Kozloff as "the cause célèbre of the Spring."
Marisol's sculptures — droll, surprising, at once sun-loving and silently morbid — had everyone beguiled. "The wit and imagination were fantastic," wrote another critic, Tom Hess.
Boxy and frontal, like upright sarcophagi, they were carved, assembled, accessorized, overlaid with deft figurative drawing and bright, patterned paint. Wry but open-hearted, full of invention, toylike but monumental, they portrayed artists, movie stars, presidents, and glamorous women.
One of those women was Marisol herself. A sort of Cindy Sherman before the fact, she repeatedly used her own image to try out various readymade personas.
New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired one sculpture from the show, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery another. Along with John Updike, Andre Previn, and Jim Dine, Marisol was included in Life magazine's 1962 "A Red-Hot Hundred" list.
Her sculptures were given a room to themselves in a group survey, called "Americans 1963," at MoMA. And her follow-up solo show in 1964 was overrun. Viewers "came at the rate of two thousand a day," noted Lawrence Campbell in Cosmopolitan. Among them were "not only everyone who counts in the art world, but the kind of people one does not expect to find in an art gallery — mothers with five children, for example."
The following year, Marisol was the subject of a profile by Gloria Steinem in Glamour magazine, and another by Grace Glueck, in The New York Times. Glueck's article opened with a quote from an anonymous admirer calling Marisol "a Latin Garbo." Warhol, who put her in two of his films, "Kiss" and "Thirteen Most Beautiful Women," called her "the first girl artist with glamour."
Three thousand people stood in line to get into Marisol's 1966 show at New York's Sidney Janis Gallery. And two years later, her work was included in both the Venice Biennale and the influential Documenta exhibition in Kassel, West Germany.
Today, few people have even heard of Marisol. Glueck had insisted in her 1965 profile that her works had "high survival value." But within a decade, that assertion was already looking dubious. Marisol, by 2000, had been essentially erased from the history of postwar art.
And yet . . . why? How could a career that was so successful, so widely acclaimed, virtually disappear from view? Did she simply turn her back on it all? Was it self-sabotage? Sexism? Or something stranger?
Almost certainly, all of the above. And of course more nuanced, equally credible explanations also exist. But what seems indubitable is that Marisol, 84 now and in failing health in New York, produced a body of work more interesting, more accomplished, and more original than all but a handful of the storied artists of her generation.
Proudly independent, she did not fit into any of the era's retrospectively sanctified movements. And yet she played a key role in shaping a cultural shift away from mid-century, atomic-age existentialism (epitomized in art by Abstract Expressionism) toward the visual pizzazz, double-edged irony, and deadpan distillations of Pop. A fascinating, complex figure, she has waited a long time for the resurgence of interest in her work that is now underway.
This summer, Marisol is the subject of a much anticipated retrospective, a decade in the planning, at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis. Small but serious, it is the first show to offer a credible overview of Marisol's entire career.
Just as important as the show is the first-rate catalog that accompanies it. Published by Yale University Press in association with the Memphis Brooks, it has a revelatory biographical essay by the show's indefatigable curator, Marina Pacini, and several accompanying essays, by Dore Ashton, Deborah Cullen, and Douglas Dreishpoon among others, that do much to deepen our understanding of Marisol, her times, and her preoccupations.
In some ways the show feels like the culmination of a gradual process of rediscovery. Over the past decade, key Marisol works have been appearing in important shows and collections, including "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968," which came to the Tufts University Art Gallery in 2011, and the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection of Latin American Art, selections from which are now on show at the Museum of Fine Arts.
One by one, Marisol's sculptures have been pulled out of storage and put on display in major museums, many of them in New England. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has had its key, early Marisol, "Ruth" — a portrait of Marisol's friend, the artist Ruth Kligman — on display for much of the past five years.
Both the Yale University Art Gallery and MoMA have more than one important Marisol on display. And Marisol's 1965 sculpture "The Family" was acquired in 2005 by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H., where it has quickly become one of the most popular works in the permanent collection.
Even at the height of her fame, Marisol was never giddy about her situation. She understood the dynamics of fame and was refreshingly frank about how she acquired it. "It has happened because I made it happen," she said at the time.
She was industrious. "Her discipline is iron," said Kligman. "Sometimes I've passed her studio at 2 a.m. and seen her plugging away." And she continued to enroll in art classes even after she began exhibiting.
She knew, too, how to generate interest in her work, and was willing to accept (though, initially, it went against the ethos of the time) that she could help this process along by generating interest in herself.
Captivatingly beautiful, she possessed the secret theatricality of the intensely shy. As early as 1961, she became notorious after participating in a panel discussion with four male artists at The Club, a collective of (mostly male) artists that had formed in 1949. Marisol turned up on that occasion wearing a white mask tied on with strings.
The discussion was only just underway when a chorus of voices, getting louder, began calling for her to take off the mask. They stamped their feet, shouting, "Take off that goddamn mask! Let's see your face!"As one witness recalled, "when the noise got deafening," Marisol finally obliged. She pulled the strings and the mask slipped off, only to reveal her own face made up exactly like the mask.
"What a stunt!" recalled the witness. "It's something only she would think of, and it brought down the house."
Marisol's sculptures — not unlike Warhol's paintings and screen prints — were made with the public very much in mind. They were portraits of popes, prime ministers, playboys, and presidents, of generals and jazz musicians, artists and astronauts, Andy Warhol and John Wayne, along with families, weddings, and babies.
And yet, as Pacini and others have noted, there were private dimensions even to this most public phase of her production. She gave some portraits multiple faces, for instance — suggesting a sense of self disengaged from the gears of identity. She also gave them morbidly neutral, frozen, or strangely squashed features, suggesting dark psychological pressures behind the fictive erotics of fame.
She focused on telling hand gestures and played up the dissonance between, on the one hand, her sculptures' crude blockishness, and on the other, drawing and carving of great finesse. She also created a lively tension between brilliantly specific details and a delirious profusion of vivid color and patterning.
Apart from her interest in public figures, what came through, above all, was an obsession with childhood and with family dynamics.
Marisol's ostensible glamour glossed over a troubled youth, one that clearly carried over into adulthood. Born in Paris in 1930 to wealthy Venezuelan parents, she spent her early life traveling the world. Her mother and father were in flight, she believed, from boredom.
According to Pacini, whose biographical essay in the catalog contributes enormously to our understanding of Marisol, the family moved to Venezuela in 1935 and spent the following years shuttling between Caracas and New York.
In 1941, Marisol's mother committed suicide. Marisol, who was 11, said she "decided never to talk again. . . . I really didn't talk for years except for what was absolutely necessary in school and on the street. . . . I was into my late twenties before I started talking again — and silence had become such a habit that I really had nothing to say to anybody."
In 1946, her father moved the family to Los Angeles, and three years later, Marisol, now 19 and determined to pursue a life in art, went to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Academie Julian. In 1950, after a year back in LA, she moved to New York, where she continued her education at a series of art schools. She attended the influential German émigré Hans Hofmann's classes in New York and, over the summer, in Provincetown.
Around 1954, she turned to sculpting. "I was very sad myself, and the people I met were so depressing," she later explained in her characteristically flat yet forthright tone. "I started doing something funny so I would be happier — and it worked."
She spent time at the Cedar Street Tavern, by then a famous downtown artists' hangout, where she met the likes of Alex Katz, William King (an important influence), and Willem de Kooning, with whom she had a brief affair.
"I was a bohemian," she later admitted. "I was stoned on marijuana all day and all night. That's what I did. I was promiscuous."
She began making carved wooden sculptures — naive, frontal, and cheerfully painted — and soon she attracted the attention of the dealer Leo Castelli.
Castelli had just opened what would become the most influential gallery of the postwar period. He included her in a 1957 group show, along with the young Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Her work was singled out for praise, and later that year — before either Rauschenberg or Johns — he gave her a solo show.
The show was reviewed admiringly in the art press, and Marisol was even written up in a Life magazine piece about woodcarvers. But she seemed unready for the attention, and — anticipating her actions 10 years hence — she fled. In this case, to Italy.
Castelli was angry, she later recalled. "How can you leave when things are just beginning?" he asked.
But Rome was fruitful for Marisol. She met up with de Kooning, who was then at the height of his fame. (He had come to Rome with his new girlfriend, Kligman, the sole survivor of the crash that had killed his rival, Jackson Pollock.) De Kooning was trying to lose himself in drink. Marisol, meanwhile, was changing her whole approach to life and to art. She was opening herself up, letting not only personal life but current events, the social sphere, and humor all play a part in her developing aesthetic. She was beginning to doubt the idea that making great art was inevitably a process of distillation and purification — of cutting things out — and realizing that it was false to think, as she later put it, that "I had to reject something in order to be a strong person."
The contrary, she realized, was true: "It opened everything for me. I felt free and generous. I started doing my best work in 1960, after I came back to New York."
Three years later, although she had parted ways, amicably, with Castelli, Marisol was at the top of her game, and her career was taking off. So was her social life.
She met Andy Warhol, who seems to have fallen under her spell. They were seen at all the parties together. She took him and a friend to a party filled with Abstract Expressionists, almost all of whom detested Warhol and everything he represented. Mark Rothko — whose personality was in every way the opposite of Warhol's — took the hostess aside.
"How could you let them in?" he asked. "But what can I do?" she replied. "They came with Marisol."
For a time, Marisol was willing to enjoy all the acclaim that came her way in the late '50s and '60s. But ultimately, it seems, fame didn't interest her. "It doesn't make any real difference whether I continue to be successful," she said in 1965. "I could go on working even unrecognized."
And so — as if wanting to test that proposition — in 1968, with the world convulsing violently, Marisol embarked on an extensive period of foreign travel. She went to Asia, Tahiti, the Caribbean, and South America. After five years, she returned to work, but with a very different attitude: "I am not working for the general public anymore," she explained to Cindy Nemser in 1973. "I lost interest."
The work that followed was intensely private. It included an extraordinary series of large-scale drawings in colored pencil and crayon. At once erotic and disturbingly violent, they combined guns with limbs and mouths, and suggested a psychedelic sliding about of fear and desire, an abject confusion of subject and object, and — not least — an imagination working at full throttle.
Some were on black backgrounds, others on white. Marisol gave them titles like "Lick the Tire of My Bicycle," "I Hate You Creep and Your Fetus," "Will I Always Be a Basket Case," and "The American Nightmare."
She inscribed handwritten text on many of them. One work, "Caracas," shows a snarling face in bright colors with text and various shapes emerging like dreadlocks: "Stop promising me. I think I am no good." "I want to be treated badly forever. It excites me sexually," "When you first came I thought you were such a nice young lady," and "A dirty woman with sperm coming out of her mouth."
Marisol had dabbled in erotic imagery throughout her career. Some of the stacked bronze figurines she exhibited at Leo Castelli's in the late '50s, for instance, were slyly sexual. "Erotic art is a way out from war and bombing," she said later. "It's a good moral idea to distract people from destroying themselves."
But these new works strongly hinted that churning beneath these public utterances were more private demons.
The torrid turn her work took in the early '70s didn't last long. It was superseded by a return to sculpted portraits, including a series depicting artists, from Picasso and Magritte to de Kooning and Georgia O'Keeffe. These were brilliant, full of character and wit.
Between 1982 and '84, she worked on a full-blown, three-dimensional take on Leonardo's "Last Supper," now owned by the Metropolitan Museum. And toward the end of the '80s, she returned to her interest in ordinary people caught up in adverse circumstances. She made a series of powerful sculptures and installations portraying anonymous outcast figures, hungry and impoverished, singly or in groups. She also completed an extended series of sculptures of Native Americans.
All these works have great merit. But none hit the cultural sweet spot quite as surely as those boxy portraits from the 1960s.
Shamelessly combining bright, decorative color, illustrative drawing, and cartoony impulses, those '60s works inevitably fell out of favor as avant-garde art took a sharp turn in the '70s toward Minimalism and Conceptualism. To many, Marisol's wooden tableaux seemed neither one thing nor another. Inflected by various Latin influences, they also bore the stamp of old-style American folk art — weather vanes, carousels, and so on. But as Marisol herself once said, calling her a folk artist would be as ridiculous as calling Picasso an African artist.
Today, many of the prejudices that worked against her in the '70s and '80s have withered away. Qualities that were held against her have lately been rehabilitated, and seem almost to be merging, like the circles of a Venn diagram moving closer and closer together, into a new cultural sweet spot. Portraiture is no longer old hat. "Decorative," "illustrative," and "cartoony" are no longer the pejoratives they once were. The utterly original way in which Marisol combined these qualities, and more besides, seems freshly inspired.
Sebastian Smee can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Correction: A previous version of this piece conflated the names of two contributors who wrote essays for the exhibition's catalog.


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The Georgia Genealogical Society is pleased to
sponsor the presentation "Family Search Wiki" with
Laura Williams Carter on February 18th, 2013.
Summary: Laura will
explain the FamilySearch Wiki. She will demonstration the usefulness of the
Wiki and show how each of us can contribute to the valuable resource.
Presenter: Laura Williams
Carter is a professional genealogist who worked at the Athens-Clarke County
Library (including her service as the Heritage Room Librarian) for many years.
She is a member of several
genealogical, historical, and professional societies and organizations.
She has told us that she is hoping that
genealogy will keep her brain in great shape now that she is retired and finally
has time to research her own family."
This presentation
will be broadcast live on Monday February 18th, 2013:
· 8:00 pm Eastern
· 7:00 pm Central
· 6:00 pm Mountain
· 5:00 am Pacific
After registering you will receive a
confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar. You will
use your unique URL in your confirmation email to logon to the live broadcast
on the 18th of February.


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Stanford's Woods Institute awards 2011 round of Environmental Venture Projects
Seven Stanford faculty teams have been awarded Woods Institute Environmental Venture Projects grants for research that tackles global sustainability challenges.
The Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University has awarded seven new Environmental Venture Projects (EVP) grants for interdisciplinary research aimed at finding practical solutions promoting global sustainability.
Seven faculty teams will receive grants totaling $1,025,000 over two years to tackle a broad range of environmental challenges, from coral reefs in American Samoa to groundwater supply in China. The seven projects were selected from an initial pool of 24 letters of intent submitted to a faculty committee led by Elizabeth Hadly and Chris Francis.
"This year, we received a number of excellent proposals from departments and disciplines not represented before," said Hadly, professor of biology. As an example, she pointed to a newly funded EVP grant designed to foster long-term, pro-environmental behavior by ecotourists.
"We're very excited and honored to receive this grant," said Nicole Ardoin, principal investigator on the ecotourism project.
"Our EVP team is led by social scientists from education, anthropology, psychology and the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab," said Ardoin, assistant professor of education and center fellow at the Woods Institute. "Given the tremendous growth of ecotourism, we believe that our interdisciplinary approach has the potential to influence environmental behavior, stewardship and decision-making on a global scale, which will have a direct impact on environmental quality."
Forty-four EVP grants totaling more than $6.4 million have been awarded to faculty from all seven schools at Stanford since the annual program was established in 2004.
"Over the years, there has been a steady rise in the number of new faculty who've received EVP funding," said Francis, associate professor of environmental Earth system science. "In coming months, we'll be exploring new opportunities for increasing the number of applicants from all schools and disciplines across campus."
Following are the seven projects awarded EVP grants in 2011:
Compromised Groundwater Quality Resulting from Large-Scale Damming Projects: In 2006, China completed construction of the massive Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River. This EVP will look at the impact of the dam on the groundwater supply for more than 30 million people who inhabit the region.
Principal Investigator (PI): Scott Fendorf (Environmental Earth System Science/Woods Institute). Co-PIs: Stephan Graham (Geological and Environmental Sciences), Richard Luthy (Civil and Environmental Engineering/Woods Institute), and Steven Gorelick and Eric Lambin (Environmental Earth System Science/Woods Institute).
Rapid Assessment of Human Exposure to Airborne Persistent Organic Pollutants: More than 15 percent of Americans report sensitivities to indoor environments – a condition known as "sick building syndrome." Utilizing new laser technology, the EVP team will develop a portable instrument that measures volatile organic compounds in air and breath samples with unprecedented speed and accuracy.
PI: Lynn Hildemann (Civil and Environmental Engineering). Co-PI: Mark Cullen (Medicine). Investigator: Konstantin Vodopyanov (Applied Physics).
Geography of Food Contamination by Coal Emissions in N.W. China: Mercury, lead and other atmospheric emissions from coal combustion adversely affect the health of hundreds of millions of people across China. The EVP team will map Chinese croplands most at risk from airborne contaminants, allowing managers to develop land-use policies that maximize yields and minimize health impacts.
PI: Eric Lambin (Environmental Earth System Science/Woods Institute). Co-PIs: Jennifer Wilcox (Energy Resources Engineering), Scott Fendorf (Environmental Earth System Science/Woods Institute) and David Freyberg (Civil and Environmental Engineering/Woods Institute). Investigator: Scott Rozelle (Woods Institute/Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies).
How Marine Species Affect Ocean Acidification: Increased acidification of the ocean from atmospheric carbon dioxide negatively affects many marine species. However, marine organisms can also have a strong affect on the pH of their environment through respiration and photosynthesis. This project will look at the impact of biological and physical processes on ocean acidification and the future of coral reefs.
PI: Stephen Palumbi (Biology/Woods Institute). Co-PIs: Stephen Monismith (Civil and Environmental Engineering/Woods Institute) and Rob Dunbar (Environmental Earth System Science/Woods Institute).
Facilitating Pro-Environmental Behavior: The goal of this project is to transform the typical nature-based tourism experience into a platform for motivating and sustaining pro-environmental behaviors among the world's 70 million-plus ecotourists. Fieldwork will be conducted in California and the Galapagos Islands.
PIs: Nicole Ardoin (School of Education/Woods Institute) and William Durham (Anthropology). Co-PI: Ewart Thomas (Psychology). Investigator: B.J. Fogg (Computer Science).
Rural Health and Development at the Food-Water Nexus: The researchers will explore how access to clean water and a nutritional diet affect the progression of tuberculosis and HIV infection in rural African households.
Co-PIs: Jenna Davis (Civil and Environmental Engineering/Woods Institute), Eran Bendavid (Medicine) and Roz Naylor (Woods Institute/Freeman Spogli Institute).
Electrically Conducting Nanomaterials Filter for Point-of-Use Water Disinfection: The goal of this one-year pilot grant is to investigate the feasibility of developing an ultra-speed, low-cost portable filter that removes bacteria and other pathogens from drinking water.
PI: Yi Cui (Materials Science and Engineering). Co-PI: Ali Boehm (Civil and Environmental Engineering).
Established in 2004, the Woods Institute for the Environment serves as a catalyst and hub for Stanford University's interdisciplinary environmental research, education and action.
Mark Shwartz is communications manager at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
Media Contact
Mark Shwartz, Woods Institute for the Environment: (650) 723-9296, email@example.com
Paula Wetzel, Woods Institute for the Environment: (650) 724-5846, firstname.lastname@example.com
Elizabeth Hadly, Biology: (650) 498-4995, email@example.com
Chris Francis, Environmental Earth System Science: (650) 724-0301, email@example.com


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Deep Learning: Algorithms and Applications (SPRINGER-VERLAG, 2019).
CBMM Memos were established in 2014 as a mechanism for our center to share research results with the wider scientific community. Click here to read more about the memos and to see a full list of the memos.


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This article is more than 1 year old
Windows 7 prepped for August 6 release
Family pack confirmed
Microsoft has admitted there will be a Windows 7 family pack, while revealing it planned a phased release of the client's code ahead of October's official launch.
The company has also hinted strongly at a release-to-manufacturing date for Windows 7 of August 6.
TechNet and MSDN subscribers will be able to download English-language versions of the RTM code on August 6, the company said Tuesday.
OEMs will get their copies of the code two days after RTM, Windows 7 evangelist Brandon LeBlanc blogged.
LeBlanc did not name the RTM date, but he did say OEMs will get code after online availability because of the time it will take to release and distribute the images.
That indicates RTM will be on August 6 as developers generally get code first via download instead of waiting for a disk to arrive.
The president of Microsoft's Windows division, Steven Sinofsky, said in May that RTM would take place following feedback on the current Windows 7 release candidate code.
RTM is when the operating system is considered finished, and mass-production begins with code pressed on CDs and code sent to OEMs for installation on new PCs.
Once code has been released, customers on volume licenses and with Software Assurance subscriptions will get RTM code on August 7, while those without SA can get the code on September 1. That's also the date when discounts of between 15 and 35 per cent will kick in for customers without a SA subscription.
Microsoft partner program gold-certified partners and Action Pack subscribers will be the next tranche of recipients, getting English-language versions of the code on August 16.
The next big date will be October 1, when non English-language versions of Windows 7 will be made available.
The official launch is scheduled for October 22.
LeBlanc also confirmed Microsoft does indeed plan a family pack for installation on up to three PCs but that it will only be available in selected markets.
LeBlanc noted the pack followed feedback from beta testers and enthusiasts during the last three years that "we need a better solution for homes with multiple PCs".
He supplied no further information on the family pack, but based on what we've seen already, you should expect to pay $149.99 for the three-license pack.
Microsoft launched a Windows Vista Family Discount Program on January 30, 2007 that let home users buy two further licenses for $50 for use on home machines.
The program was panned by customers. ®


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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Scott Windsor Index
Sola Scriptura Discussion (Starring Steve Hays and Featuring Francis Beckwith)
1. (Francis Beckwith) Sola Scriptura and the canon of Scripture: a philosophical reflection
2. (TurretinFan) Beckwith's Bait and Switch
3. (Steve Hays) Is sola Scriptura self-refuting?
4. (Scott Windsor) Is Sola Scriptura self-refuting?
5. (Steve Hays) (a) The supreme judge of all religious controversies & (b) Principles of Sola Scriptura
6. (Scott Windsor) Sola Scriptura Answering Steve Hays
7. (TurretinFan) Response to Scott Windsor (regarding Steve Hays and Sola Scriptura)
8. (Scott Windsor) Response to TurretinFan on Sola Scriptura
9. (TurretinFan) Second Response to Scott Windsor
10. (Steve Hays) Rube Goldberg prooftexting
11. (Scott Windsor) Non-Rube Goldberg Response
12. (Scott Windsor) QA with TurretinFan
(As far as I know, no further response is planned by TurretinFan or Steve Hays.)
Labels: Index, Scott Windsor, Steve Hays
Published by Turretinfan to the Glory of God, at 12:22 PM
8 comments:
- steve said...
Thanks, TF!
- Wednesday, January 27, 2010 6:06:00 PM
- Rhology said...
And don't miss the (shameless plug) series with him on sola fide over at Beggars All!
- Thursday, January 28, 2010 3:34:00 PM
- Rhology said...
Oh, I guess that series also dealt with why the Roman Magisterium never does anything and private interpretation.
- Thursday, January 28, 2010 3:36:00 PM
is that sentence correct?
"....and private...".
If so, would you type out the same meaning with another sentence different than that one?
thanks - Thursday, January 28, 2010 6:08:00 PM
- Rhology said...
Oh, I guess that series also dealt with why the Roman Magisterium never does anything and also with the topic of private interpretation. - Thursday, January 28, 2010 6:11:00 PM
Wow, I privately yet so openly and publicly interpreted your fallibilities, Rhology!
But, as for the Spirit of Grace and Truth that works the Faith once delivered to the Saints, within you, you do seem to have an infallible knack for repentance being so easily corrected, and not get offended by your fallibilities!
Now, why is that? :) - Thursday, January 28, 2010 7:36:00 PM
- Rhology said...
I'm gonna go ahead and guess it's Jesus living in me. :-)
- Thursday, January 28, 2010 7:45:00 PM
You don't say? Ah, no, you do say!
geeesh, what is a fallible guy suppose to do? Repent and repent often, as in daily??
Mat 6:11 Give us this day our daily bread,
Mat 6:12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. - Thursday, January 28, 2010 8:35:00 PM


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Membership questions? Log in issues? Email email@example.com
Its really not as complicated as it sounds and the equipment investment is minimal. A 48qt cooler and a few bucks at the hardware store (see Denny's site). The propane burner and kettle and chiller will be a bigger expense (but well worth it). You can pick up a 'turkey fryer' at Walmart or someplace similar for under $60 - you'll have your burner and kettle to do a full boil.d kettle will make your job easier on brew day. The chiller and controling fermentation temperature will help you make better beer.
I also hesitated with moving to all grain - it seemed so mysterious - but I'm so glad I did.
Quote from: pdbreen on December 11, 2009, 11:38:05 amI also hesitated with moving to all grain - it seemed so mysterious - but I'm so glad I did.Ha! Same here. Seeing words like 2-row, mash tun, sparging, etc made it seem so far out there.
It seems fermentation temp control was a popular theme with everyone. What kind of refrigeration are people using? I would need to find something that I can put in my apartment and doesn't take up too much space. Do the mini fridges fit buckets/carboys?Also, with regards to doing full boils, is it possible to do this on a regular gas stove? I saw someone mentioned getting a separate propane burner, but again i'm not sure I can swing this in the apartment. This leads to the question on what a good size kettle is for a 5 gallon batch? And is there a good kettle to have for full grain brewing?
O.K. I looked for this answer on the forum, but I couldn't find it. So here it goes...This question seems really trivial but I don't want to waste anything. I recently picked up equipment to brew 10 gallon batches. Is it as simple as doubling everything in a 5 gallon recipe? Including 2 packets of Wyeast Activator? Any insight would be most helpful, Thanks.